Skipper & Skeeto: Paradise Park

The Good
The game starts in Skipper's home where there are books on a shelf on the wall which trigger mini games. These range from simple to taxing for example
- from the Book Of Numbers which just counts from one to one hundred - I guess teaching number recognition - through to double digit multiplication.
- from printing off a sheet to colour in with paint or crayons to memorising European countries by location and name.
It's a good range of mini games and when that is combined with what is effectively an adventure game there is a lot of content here too.

The Bad
This game has some of the worst voice acting I have come across in a long time, in this game you'll find a fake Welsh accent, a fake Australian accent and I'm pretty sure there's a West Country accent in there too. The unnecessary accents can be forgiven and they could even enhance the game but unfortunately there is a complete lack of expression in all the voices almost all of the time as though the lines are being proofread and not acted. It starts when the good fairy loses her wand and calls for help - people read their optician's eye chart with more expression and urgency than are given to her lines. As for the main characters, Skipper and Skeeto, it sounds as if someone had the bright idea of getting a couple of six year old amateurs to read the lines so they'd have more appeal to the target audience and it just does not work.
It's all so passionless and uninspired that, for me, it kills the game.

Then there are the mini games, these earn points and if you have enough you can summon the good fairy to help you. A summoning costs fifty points and puzzles score between one and three points so you have to work to get those points. The games range from the tough to the easy to the odd. For example;
- I'm pretty nifty with a mouse but even I had problems completing the Balloon Hunt in the minimum time and this is a kids game.
- The other balloon puzzle, Balloon Hunt, is easy to play - the player pops balloons revealing pieces of a picture and has to guess the animal. That's fine but has odd answers, a hippopotamus is called a hippobull, and the tortoise is a giant dome shaped tortoise presumably because there are giant flat tortoises. However the oddest I encountered was when a dog was revealed. I thought I was pretty safe guessing a dog but the correct answer was a Manchester Terrier. I've grown up, grown old and retired and I didn't know that breed existed! Very odd!

This game is aimed at a target audience ranging from four to twelve years old which is a huge range to try to appeal to. I know that when my kids were old enough to play this title on their own they wouldn't because they'd look at the cover and say "It's for four year olds dad! No thanks".
Conversely when they were young they'd probably enjoy playing it with mummy/daddy - but only for so long. I see then getting frustrated because the exploration of Paradise Park is something they cannot do on their own and they'd only be prepared to watch someone else play their game for a limited period of time. I've played the exploration part of the game and forty-five minutes in and I still hadn't finished it. No youngster can sustain interest for that long in a game, especially one that just doesn't engage them.

The Bottom Line
There were a few games in this series so they must have been a commercial success which I can only assume is because the original French version was pretty good.

I played the UK release and I cannot recommend it. The voice acting discouraged me and I cannot see it ever engaging my kids interest because it's just not fun to play.